“In this day and age of email and the internet, our expectations were
that computer-mediated group brainstorming, i.e. across the web with no
face-to face contact, was going to have the best results,” Davidson
says. “What we found, however, was that people working as individuals
were at least as effective and possibly more so than those
brainstorming in a group over the web when trying to solve ‘wicked,’
tangled problems, both in terms of quality and quantity.”

As Bob Horn and I have noted, we believe that processes for resolving Wicked Problems that entail at least some face-to-face interactions leverage collective intelligence and lead to better solutions.